How Does a Manager Use Temporal Structures to Make Their Life Easier
Written by Jamie Sunday, 15 April 2012 11:36
Many managers, no matter how talented, don’t understand how structures create behaviour. Churchill said something like the following: we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us. It’s the same for the static and temporal structures in our offices. We - or someone - at first shapes them and they in turn shape us. Getting the design of structures right, then, is a skill that many managers need to understand. When they understand it, their lives get easier. The question I want to answer today is: how does a temporal structure aid a manager in his day job? In order to answer that question, I have to first answer these two:- What is a manager?
- What is a temporal structure?
In Pursuit of an Acceptance of Human Nature
Written by Jamie Tuesday, 24 January 2012 10:21
In 1980, Geert Hofstede published a book called Culture’s Consequences. He had been lucky enough to gain access to a huge survey that IBM had carried out against its employees. Hofstede was able to draw some conclusions about different countries, including the distance between ‘the man on the street’ and a member of the ruling class. He called this the Power Distance and compared countries to each other in what he called the Power Distance Index. This is what he had to say about leaders from different countries:
Welcome
Monday, 12 April 2010 17:05
The idea of a lone programmer is gone, consigned to a revisionist historian’s fantasy. The pervasive nature of software products mean that software projects only succeed when many parts of an organisation pull together. This is most true in the area of financial-engineering. System failure can cause organisational demise whereas those who ‘get it’, those who understand the nature of financial and software engineer, tend to be very successful.
Financial Agile brings together engineers and managers from various disciplines to share ideas and experiences on engineering for finance. Every month we organize meetings in the extended Randstad - Utrecht, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and London. For those who want to share ideas, have a pint, or borrow a book, these events are for you.
Our mission is to create awareness, and create a movement, across the financial industry. We’d like to help give birth to financial engineering as a modern engineering dicipline. Since our goal is rather serious, we rarely are.
And the winner is...
Written by Jorrit Friday, 16 September 2011 00:00
What was supposed to be a nice and peaceful week turned out to be a thriller as we needed to rank the essay competition entries. Just before our self-inflicted deadline today, and with great difficulty, we came to our decision. Without further ado, the winners are:
- Lisa Crispin, It's not testing
- Laurent Bossavit, Allofness of Realtiy
- amv71amv71, Becoming More Agile
The essays were judged on their style, readability and content. A panel judged the essays independently and the results were collated. There was variance across the judging with all entries on the short-list being one of the judge’s favourite or second favourite. We pushed all the results into the magic spreadsheet and that’s how we came to our final judgment.
We hope you all enjoyed the competition as much as we did. And we hope we inspired some people to realise there is more to writing than top-five blogs.
This competition couldn’t have been organised without the help of our sponsor uD.vg. Please click on the link or, if you need your organisation transforming, give them a call.
We’ll be running another competition in the new year and we hope to have bigger prizes and more entrants! If you didn't win this time, you might win next. And we are always looking for ways to improve, so please drop us a line with any suggestions.
Thanks, Jamie and Jorrit.
